Firefox best browser to run Unity WebGL content according to Unity

If you are serious about browser games you may have the Unity plugin installed in your browser of choice. This plugin is currently required to play games that use Unity, a cross-platform game creation system that includes a game engine and an integrated development environment (IDE).

The company is currently working on supporting WebGL due to the fact that most companies that create browsers are moving away from the plugin system.

One of the challenges of the move is to find out if WebGL is fast enough to play games and how different browsers, operating systems and hardware compare.

A benchmark has been created to measure the performance. You can run the benchmark right on this page if you are interested to find out how your system runs fares in those tests.

You may receive an error message when you load the page depending on the browser that you use. If you load the page with Firefox or Chrome, all is fine but if you run it with Chromium for example, you will get an error message and the test won't run at all.

You can select to run all or just some of the benchmarks. It takes a couple of minutes to complete the benchmark, and the Unity team notes that the Mandelbrot GPU benchmark has a bug on Windows currently which affects the score of that test when run on the operating system.

The Unity team ran tests on a 2.6 GHz i7 MacBook Pro system running OS X 10.10. It compared the native performance with that when run using Firefox 32, Chrome 37 and Safari 8.

According to this test, Firefox is faster in almost all benchmarks which makes it the best browser currently to run Unity WebGL content.

As you can see, it is leading the two other browsers by a large margin.While that is just one test on one system, it highlights how well Firefox with asm.js performs when it comes to WebGL.

If you check individual benchmark results, you will notice that WebGL outperformed native code significantly. This is the case for tests that rely on script performance according to the Unity team.

It should be interesting to see how browsers on other systems perform in the test. I'd like to see how Internet Explorer and Opera perform in this test, even though it is almost certain that Opera will perform similarly to Chrome and Safari.

Summary

Article Name

Firefox best browser to run Unity WebGL content according to Unity

Description

Unity Benchmarks is a new tool by the Unity team to measure the WebGL performance of web browsers that support the standard.

Author

Martin Brinkmann

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

You simply can’t compare other browser that use different api’s and engines. If any seriously IT-site shows anything about it, they really don’t know anything. Chrome use a different javascript engine, another webgl render technique and such things. And of course different hardware/drivers/os may also shows you different results.

Each browser have there own pro and con, to say “best” is also very stupid (unity should better say optimized), it’s may optimized but there is no “best” since browser and engines getting updates very regular. Maybe in 10 years IE 15 is the best, nobody knows. And think about it, there are not many webgl standard tools available atm.

I really shake my head everytime I read anything about “best” “excellent” and such things. Best tool is useless if the user does not need it, not use it or if there is nothing you can compare with it, as always it’s matter of taste what is “the best”.

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.